The Quiet American, novel by Graham Greene, combining a murder mystery with a cautionary tale of Western involvement in Vietnam. It was first published in 1955, at the beginning of the U.S. involvement in Vietnamese politics, and it proved to be prophetic. The novel concerns the relationship between the American Alden Pyle, a quiet, naive CIA operative, and the story’s narrator, Thomas Fowler, a world-weary British journalist.

...Sinatra were miscast, the film received largely positive reviews and was a success at the box office. The Quiet American (1958) was a bowdlerized version of Graham Greene’s novel about a mysterious American (Audie Murphy) in Saigon, Vietnam, who finds himself at odds with a cynical British reporter (Michael Redgrave). Suddenly, Last Summer...